IN THE SMOKE OF WAR, WHERE IS GOD?

Sermon delivered July 4, 2004

Grace United Methodist Church, Urbana, IL

J. Michael Smith, preacher

            In preparing this sermon, I have made several assumptions.  First, I assume that the people in this congregation have a variety of opinions on the subject of the war in Iraq.  We are not of one mind on this issue.  Second, I assume that each person here has something valuable to contribute to the conversation on the war issue.  This sermon is not intended as the ‘final word’ on the topic—a preacher trying to tell others what to think.  It is, rather, intended as an invitation to conversation, not a settling of the issue.  And third, I assume that, for Christians, Jesus is Lord of Lords and King of Kings.  No prime minister, president, general, or royal family has a right to dilute our loyalty to the teachings of Jesus.  Our greatest loyalty to our own political leaders is to speak the truth, in love, to their power.  –jms

Ezekiel 13: 8-12  Therefore thus says the Lord God:  Because you have uttered falsehood and envisioned lies, I am against you, says the Lord God.  My hand will be against the prophets who see false visions and utter lying divinations; they shall not be in the council of my people, nor be enrolled in the register of the house of Israel, nor shall they enter the land of Israel; and you shall know that I am the Lord God.  Because, in truth, because they have misled my people, saying, “Peace,” when there is no peace; and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear whitewash on it.  Say to those who smear whitewash on it that it shall fall.  There will be a deluge of rain, great hailstones will fall, and a stormy wind will break out.  When the wall falls, will it not be said to you, “Where is the whitewash you smeared on it?”[1]

Matthew 5:9  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.[2]

God always blesses the reading of the Holy Scripture.

            I am a Christian, and I am a citizen of the United States.  I feel very good about both of those. 

            I love being a Christian and being in the Christian Church.  Jesus really is a hero to me.  The stories and songs of the Christian faith continually evoke realities beyond my imagination.  The history of the church is full of richness and wonder.  The teachings of the church (love of neighbor, do unto others as you would have them do unto you) are incomparable.  There is no nobler way to live one’s life than to be Christ to everyone we meet.  I love being a part of the church.

            And, I love being an American.  In the past 3 months, I have been from sea to shining sea.  I have seen the capitol building in Washington D.C. and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  I have hiked the Grand Canyon and biked the Everglades.  I have admired the skyscrapers of Chicago and pondered a lonely cowboy riding the high plains of Wyoming.  I’m fascinated by our nation’s stories:  the second continental congress, whose decisions we honor today, this July 4^th, the battles of the civil war, the struggles for civil rights, and the explorations of space.  I have shaken hands with two presidents and made pilgrimages to the gravesites of 10 presidents--pausing in reverent reminiscence of their lives and contributions. 

            I love being a Christian.  And I love being an American. 

            But when I reflect through the history of the church, 2000 years, I don’t think that God has been on board with everything that church leaders have decided to do.  Likewise, when I reflect on the history of the United States, more than 200 years of it, I don’t think that God has been on board with everything our nation’s leaders have undertaken. 

            Many who have led the church, and many who have led the nation, have had the humility to recognize that God may or may not approve of their decisions.  All too often, however, we have had leaders in the church and in the nation who have cloaked less than noble motives in the language of God.  Hiding behind religious rhetoric, leaders sometimes charge ahead, abandoning wisdom, justice, and morality.  Those who have an air of certainty that they are doing what God wills often leave death, disunity, and disorientation in the wake of their governance.

            When there is war, leaders of nations and factions are fond of solemnly claiming the presence of God on their particular side.  Our current president is a very religious man.  And he has stated that in this war with Iraq, he is doing the will of God.  He has no doubts, no reservations, nor even the pretense of humility.[3]  We have to go back to Abraham Lincoln, in this country, to find a wartime president whose soul was healthy enough to make room for those inner struggles that occur when practical necessities collide with principles.  Lincoln’s soul was courageous enough to bear those things that keep bad company with each other:  hard realities, lofty ideals, and those frequent pangs of guilt that haunt all who try to do the right thing in the midst of unsolvable complexities.  Lincoln once said, “In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be wrong, and one must be wrong.  God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.”[4]  Lincoln also reflected that “Both (sides) read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes God’s aid against the other.”[5] 

            When we ask, “Which side is God on?” the Bible does give us some strong clues.  From the beginning of the Bible until its final chapters, God is repeatedly on the side of the powerless.  In Genesis 14, Abraham, man of God, comes to the aid, with 318 soldiers, of those who have been victimized in what appears to have been a sporting battle among 9 kings.  In Exodus, God takes sides—the side of the oppressed:  the slave in the land of Egypt.  God takes the side of the young boy, David, against the giant Goliath.  And God takes the side of the exiles in the Book of Daniel when they are in danger from their captors, whether those captors be Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon or Darius of Persia. 

            If God is on the side of the weak and the powerless, then where would God be in the midst of today’s wars?  We have wars going on in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Zimbabwe, and Sudan, among other places.  In these wars, has God chosen one side over another?  Or is it possible that God takes the side of the powerless by being against some or all of these wars in the first place?

            In Iraq, we have now lost 836 American military personnel, 31 of those by suicide.  Since March of 2003, there have been 18,000 medical evacuations from Iraq, 11,700 of those are American military personnel wounded in the fighting.  In a little over a year, it is estimated that the Iraqi military has lost 5,633 by death.  The war has killed over 11,000 Iraqi civilians--the ones who are most powerless in this unfolding of history.[6] 

            While there are indeed a number of biblical narratives that present God as a vengeful, petty warrior, intent on killing every man, woman, and child in every enemy village, the Bible also gives sufficient reflection from Jesus and the prophets to flip the warrior image of God into its opposite.  There is some wisdom and insight to be gleaned from the biblical images of a warrior God.  But we gain our direction and our guidance from the words of Jesus and the words of the prophets. 

            Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  And the prophets said, “God shall be the judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  (Micah 4:3)

            Christians have pondered the issue of war from the days of the early church.  The common question is:  “Are there situations when war might be justified?”  And although Christians have never achieved consensus on that topic, many think that war is appropriate on some occasions.  By the fifth century, a well-known churchman, by the name of Augustine, developed what he called the “just war” theory.  He said that war should be a last resort, that it should only be used to remedy an injustice, that it should not injure non-combatants, and that prisoners should be treated humanely.  There is no war, currently being fought on the face of the earth, that even remotely satisfies Augustine’s standards for a just war. 

            Historically, the most radical group of Christians in opposition to war has been the Quakers.  The Quakers believe that the light of God is in every human being.  And they are unalterably opposed to killing as a solution to political and social problems. 

            It’s hard to believe that the Quakers are in the same religion as the Crusaders from the Middle Ages.  The Crusades began at the end of the 11^th century.  It was at the same time as many of the great cathedrals of Europe were being built.  Notre Dame, in Paris, for instance, was built between 1163 and 1235.  It reflected ambition, strength, idealism, soaring confidence, and the power of God over all the world.  There is a clear connection between the grand cathedrals of Europe and the armies of the pope marching toward the Near East to conquer the Muslims and return the Holy Land to Christian rulers. 

The first pope to call for a crusade was Urban II.  The year was 1095.  He decided, in the name of God, to launch an invasion of the Near East.  In a sermon delivered in Clermont in southeast France, Urban declared, “Stop murdering and devouring one another.  Take the road to Jerusalem and wrest that land from that wicked race and subject them to yourselves.”  We are told that at the conclusion of the pope’s sermon, the people rose and shouted, “Deus volt!”  “It is the will of God.”[7] 

            In 1198, the pope was a man by the name of Innocent III.  He was the most powerful man on earth at that time.  And he knew it.  He had the same relative power in his day as the president of the United States has today.  And he felt no need to collaborate with the leaders of the nations.  We quote him:  “The pope shall judge all and be judged by no one.”[8]  Innocent III was too busy to lead a crusade himself, but he was instrumental in organizing and inspiring the 4^th crusade. 

There were nine major crusades.  Christians marched through what we know today as Turkey, into Syria, through Israel, into Egypt.  They slaughtered anyone who looked different, even though some of the people they slaughtered were fellow Christians.  When they reached Jerusalem, they killed the men they found, raped the women, and threw the infants against the city wall.  After the Christians killed all the Muslims in Jerusalem, they found hundreds of Jews huddled in a synagogue.  They barred all the exits and set it afire.  Onward Christian soldiers—indeed.[9]

When the Christian soldiers laid siege on the ancient city of Antioch, we are told that the Muslim men all fled and left their women behind.  One Christian soldier wrote:  “We did nothing immoral to the women.  We simply stabbed them to death with our spears.”[10] 

            We have no trouble identifying blasphemy when people of other religions fight in the name of “God.”  We are sickened that airplanes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York in the name of God.  But are we as quick to recognize those times when Christians take God’s name in vain—by committing acts of war and violence under the cover of “divine will?”  The Christian crusades demonstrate that those who enter war in the name of the Christian God are equally blasphemous.  Christians, of all people, should know better.  It was a central tenet of Jesus’ teaching that we should love our enemies.  We should pray for our enemies. 

            How can we say that we are sincere followers of Jesus if all we pray for is our own troops?  Jesus said, “Pray for your enemies.”  He also said that even the wicked of the earth pray for those who love them.  And he wondered how we can make any difference in this world if we only pray for our own people?”[11]

            It’s time to be thinking some fresh thoughts about this awful thing that is now engaging our nation.  To be a good American is to participate in conversation about the major issues of our day.  To be a good Christian is to take seriously the commission of Jesus:  that we love our enemies and that we be peacemakers.

            When Jesus commands us to love our enemies, he gets us right to the heart of the psychology of war.  There can be no successful war unless the people agree on the enemy.  And it is the role of the political leaders of a nation to identify the enemy, caricaturize the enemy, dehumanize the enemy, villanize the enemy, make the enemy abstract, and train people who are normally peaceful to kill.[12]  People are not normally willing to kill other people.  In WWII, some studies were made of soldiers returning from the battlefront.  Among soldiers who had been in battle, less than 20% had actually fired their weapons.[13]  Our political leaders have the awesome task of neutralizing basic human decency and compassion. 

            The making of an enemy is a psychological process.  The role of defining who is or isn’t the enemy is a political process.  When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, China was our enemy.  Four years later, China was our friend.  China didn’t change.  The politicians changed their minds.  In 1980, Saddam Hussein was our friend.  In 2003, he was our enemy.  The man didn’t change:  he was a psychopathic killer that whole time.  Our politicians changed the way they kept score of things. 

            Jesus did not want his followers to leave this whole enemy thing to the politicians.  He wanted us to do our own thinking on that matter.  He asked us to love our enemies and pray for our enemies and then go from there.  Jesus was not naïve.  He was not one to ignore social and political problems and accept the status quo.  He evoked radical changes in the way peoples related to one another.  He just went about it with wisdom, street smarts, principles, and a determination to make real change in the world.

            We say that we fight wars to make the world better.  But a former secretary of defense has said that war is “essentially the result of a failure of imagination.”[14]  Violence is seldom the solution for violence.  Albert Einstein once said that problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking that created them.[15] 

            We have historical knowledge going back to 3600 B.C.  Since 3600 B.C., the human race has suffered through 14,600 wars.[16]  

            We are proud of WWII.  We like to think that WWII made the world a better place.  And in that war, we did indeed bring a halt to the German genocide of the Jews and the Japanese genocide in China.  But in a sense, WWII never really ended.  It created chaos in many places and spawned new wars.  In the wake of WWII, we have seen major wars in India, Korea, Algeria, Biafra, Vietnam, and the Middle East.  Just since 1975, wars have raged in Haiti, Grenada, the Falklands, Peru, Panama, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Congo, Eritrea, Chad, Mauritania, Somalia, Algeria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Pakistan, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Cambodia, East Timor, Sumatra, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Ireland, Chechnya, Georgia, Romania, and Spain.[17]

            Blessed are the peacemakers.  Where are the peacemakers? 

            People walk around these days with the initials WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?).  Are there enough peacemakers in the world?  Do you think that Jesus is pleased with the number of peacemakers in the world?  Is this one area where the harvest is plentiful but the workers few? 

            Peace is more than just a respite from war.  In fact, the major cause of war is the faulty way we make peace.  In a marriage or a friendship or a family—it’s not the fighting that destroys relationships, it’s the fake way we make up.  It’s the veneer of peace, on the surface, hiding the alienation underneath.  It’s what the prophet Ezekiel referred to when he said that some folks go around saying, ‘peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. 

            I suspect that the war in Iraq started with some shoddy peacemaking.  At the end of World War I, England had a dilemma.  In order to garner support for its side in WWI, it had promised what is now Syria to both France and an Arabic tribal leader by the name of Faisel.  One can’t promise the same piece of land to two different groups and expect everyone to be happy.  So England (particularly Winston Churchill) solved the dilemma by giving Syria to the French and creating an artificial country to give to Faisel.  The name of the artificial country:  Iraq.  It was made up of an impossible mixture of Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite Arabs.  It could be governed only by violence and repression.

Does every conflict have its genesis in shoddy peacemaking:  failures of honesty (to name real problems), failures of courage (to address real issues), or failures of imagination (to create futures based on mutual self interests)?  Who has the will, the soul, and the smarts to learn solid peacemaking for our own time?  Peacemaking is needed not only on an international scale, but in our marriages, our friendships, our churches, our workplaces, and our neighborhoods as well. 

            Blessed are the peacemakers.  The gifts of God, the gifts of this world, the gifts of this life, the gifts of our own blessed country are only counted unto us if we can make peace.  War consumes our resources, our imaginations, our lives.  Only God should have that much claim on us.  Blessed are the peacemakers.  Does anyone here notice the call of God to this work?  If you think God is calling you to the work of peacemaking, I want to hear from you.  I want to talk with you.  I want to encourage you.  I want to support you.  I want to pray for you.  Now—or at any time in the future, if you feel God is calling you to the work of peacemaking, please know that this is one pastor who is ready to collaborate with you on that effort.